Claudia den Boer’s To pick up a stone begins with a question almost anyone has asked while walking: why do we lift stones from the ground, throw them into water, carry them home? The Dutch photographer treats that impulse not as a curiosity but as a form of contact with the earth, perhaps even a reach toward something more durable than a single lifetime. The book follows the pursuit across the Moroccan Sahara, the Tibetan highlands, the country around Montserrat in Catalonia, and the Georgian Caucasus — places where, for den Boer, the individual stone and the mass of the mountain become difficult to separate.
The photographs do not function as documentation of locations. Made on analog film, they are later revisited within the negatives themselves: by enlarging and isolating details of images she has already taken, den Boer looks again at what she thought she had seen and finds new terrain inside it. The resulting studies set mountains, rocks and single stones against one another to test how light, distance and perspective govern our sense of scale — and whether the character of a mountain can survive in a close-up, or in a pebble held in the hand. Across the sequence, an object that appears fixed proves thoroughly changeable, its meaning shifting with the viewpoint brought to it.
Eriskay Connection issued the book in 2020 in a Sussex-bound hardcover, 120 pages, designed by Rob van Hoesel. The binding is a quiet but deliberate choice: it holds the pages open flat and gives the sequence a physical continuity that suits a project about return and re-seeing. Lithography by Marc Gijzen supports the tonal subtleties on which the close readings depend.
For collectors of contemporary Dutch and European photobooks, this is a considered example of subject and book form argued together, from a publisher whose catalogue rewards attention to structure and material. Den Boer’s argument — that looking closely at a small thing can restage how we understand an enormous one — is made by the sequencing and the making of the object itself.
